Absurdity
Drunk Woman Calls Boyfriend On Phone Like It Is 2003
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
COLUMBUS, Ohio. A local woman is facing intense social scrutiny this week after she allegedly bypassed every accepted form of modern communication and placed an unsolicited voice call to her boyfriend of two years, using her phone as what sources close to the investigation describe as "basically a telephone."
The incident occurred at approximately 1:47 a.m. Saturday outside a bar called Señor Lucky's, where Madison Howell, 27, had spent the evening celebrating her friend Brianna's birthday with what bartender Kyle Doerr confirmed was "an irresponsible volume of frozen mango margaritas."
Howell reportedly opened her contacts, located the entry labeled "Ryan (boyfriend)," and pressed the green button with her actual thumb, initiating what telecom historians are calling the most retro act committed by a millennial since someone bought a fax machine unironically.
Ryan Pellegrino, 28, a project coordinator who had been asleep since 11:15 p.m., answered the call on the fourth ring under what he described as the only reasonable assumption available to him.
"When your phone rings at 2 a.m., someone is in the hospital," Pellegrino told reporters. "I sat up. My heart was going. I said hello and she just went, 'hey, do you want Taco Bell?' She called me. With sounds coming out of her face. Into my ear."
Pellegrino confirmed that she did not want Taco Bell herself. She was asking on his behalf.
Friends present at the scene say they attempted to intervene before the call was placed. Howell's friend Cassidy Park, 26, described grabbing the phone and explaining that the correct protocol was a voice memo, a series of escalating texts, or at absolute minimum a FaceTime that Howell could hang up on before he answered.
"She looked me dead in the eyes," Park said, "and she pressed call. I don't know who raised her."
Howell, for her part, has declined to apologize and reportedly does not see the problem, which experts say is itself a symptom of the problem.
"Intoxicated voice calling was essentially eradicated between 2011 and 2013," said Dr. Lena Marsh, a communications sociologist at Ohio State University who has absolutely not been contacted for this story. "We replaced it with a perfectly good system where you type something humiliating, delete it, type it again slightly worse, and then send it at 2 a.m. so at least there's a record. The voice call bypasses every safety mechanism we have built into modern courtship."
The call lasted eleven minutes. Pellegrino says he has no memory of most of it because he was, he emphasized, asleep before it happened and technically remained half-asleep throughout. Howell reportedly narrated her Uber ride home in real time, including a two-minute sidebar about the driver's air freshener, which she described as "kind of a lot" and then "actually really good."
Pellegrino said he stayed on the line because he was too disoriented to figure out how to hang up without it being a thing.
"I just kept saying 'yeah' and 'okay' and hoping she'd stop," he said. "This is what our grandparents did every weekend. I don't know how they survived."
As of Monday, Howell had sent Pellegrino a text that read "lol sorry did I call you" with a question mark, suggesting she was aware that something had occurred but unwilling to commit to the details.
He responded three hours later with a thumbs up emoji.
The relationship is described as ongoing.
The story we are making fun of: https://reductress.com/post/retro-woman-drunk-calling-instead-of-texting/